Japanesiness: No honorifics. I thought this wouldn’t really work and I said as much in my CMS review. However, there’s no problem with dropping the honorifics here (yet), so I (somewhat) retract my statement with the option to run down the streets yelling “I was right” if honorifics end up being superior.

Karaoke.

Opening. The visual quality here wasn’t exactly the best when I watched it.

Ending. Ending’s audio is disabled by Sony because Sony sucks, but you can see what Commie was going for, hopefully.

I think the goal here was “make the karaoke as small as fucking possible so people can’t possibly read it and watch the OP/ED at the same time.” Luckily they failed on the ED because it was slow enough so that you could see the English and watch the animation too. Great color choices for both, though.

Typesetting.

Nice, nice.

Good stuff.

Her team uniform jersey (come on, Commie) here is typeset off and on throughout the show after she puts it on.

What the–

Sweet, merciful typesetting god, thank you for this bounty.

Script.

Have a seat because I’m about to blow your fucking mind. You can take the entire meaning of this line and — you with me here? — rephrase it to sound less stupid. Yes, it is possible. Allow me to show you the magic of thought!

“she turned fifteen at the end of June.”

Wow! Look at that! Dark_Sage? More like Dark_Magician! That was clearly magic!

All right, all right. I can do this. I can do this! So the goal here is to make this sound like something a human would say.

Okay, okay. A human. Not a robot. A human. Oh wow, I’m just… I’m just so flustered. This is SO FUCKING HARD.

Okay, I’m just gonna jump into this and see what happens. Ready? Ichi, ni….

“I think you can’t play the King Game with only two players.” -> “I don’t think you can play the King Game with only two players.”

Wow! I did it! Guys, did you see that? This feeling of accomplishment is like none other. It’s a bit sad to think about how Commie’s editors will never know this feeling.

Well, this was clearly thought out. I imagine the conversation went something like,

“Hey, you know how we usually make the main dialogue readable?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Let’s not do that here.”

“Brilliant idea!”

You know, I don’t even hate all of the fucking around Commie did with the main dialogue in this episode. Changing “Fire Sisters” and other words different colors when they were spoken actually added quite a bit of entertainment to the show. Those were ballsy moves, but the end result was quite positive.

However, ballsy moves are “ballsy” because you can easily drop the ball with them. That’s what happened here. Stupid placement and color change.

This is what I was talking about with the color changes. The word flared up when it was appropriate but didn’t interfere with the rest of the show. This was complimenting, rather than trying to compete with the show’s style. This along with the lines where the text was placed at the top of the screen when Araragi was thinking and looking upwards… good. Very good.

I hope whoever okay’d these two lines simply made a mistake and didn’t see the shitty repetition here. What would be really sad is if they thought they were doing some clever wordplay because this is quite frankly the exact opposite.

Second line to “I’ll take my clothes off right now.”

… Why is “while” there? It’s meaningless. It adds nothing.

No! No one says this! The line is “By that logic,”

How is this even a possible error for someone who speaks English natively? Was there no staff looking at this shit?

“that may be flammable, but it’s definitely not trash.”

*sigh*

“happened” implies this is past tense. It’s not. She still has those fucking books. Is there any context you guys can’t fuck up, Commie?

“I just happen to have a lot of books like that around there!”

Watchability: Quite watchable if you watch the typesetting more than the script.

Overall grade: A- (the typesetting buoys the rest of the release up a lot)

Well, the typesetting’s fantastic. Really, it’s better than CMS’s (although CMS did a good job too). Unfortunately, the scriptwork appears to be either non-existent or simply handed off to an unthinking hunk of flesh.

Dark Sage, If you would like a lesson in English from a native speaker, I would be more than happy to assist you. You would learn quite quickly that a lot of the things you complain about ruin your credibility and are not only correct, but very easy to understand for those of us who are not autistic or developmentally delayed.

[1]{“happened” implies this is past tense. It’s not. She still has those fucking books. Is there any context you guys can’t fuck up, Commie?

“I just happen to have a lot of books like that around there!”}

[2]{“I just happened to have a lot of books like that around there!”}

While your correction [1] is semi correct, the original [2] is a better “conversational” fit. In the original there is merely the assumption that the books had been stacked there before falling. The assumption of them falling is from the signs warning “Watch out for Bookslides”. The context of the speech up to this point seems to indicate that the books where always there and have not moved far… thus past tense is acceptable.

Your change “I just happen to have a lot of books like that around there!” is correct but ambiguous because with the context it could mean the same thing as the original OR it could mean that the books where originally scattered all around in different pile but fell together somehow… either that magically just appeared there.

TL;DR version: Either way is correct in this particular scene. That, and English a bitch even to native speakers, yet writing it can be even worse.

I think your reviews should also take into account speed of release, though I understand that would be kinda annoying, and groups don’t necessarily release every week consistently.

The reason I bring this up is because Commie (so far) has been quite fast with releasing Nise (last week was same day, this week was early next day), while CMS released ep 1 a whole 5 days after airing, and it looks like they’re taking their time with ep2 as well.

Oh, but man, thinking about the BD releases with CMS dialogue and Commie TS is giving me a bonerrrrrrrr

Black font in subs was surprising at first but I liked it. Going with Commie, really fast, more impressive typesetting + I like their little sub quirks (e.g. “Deep!” was probably on hair because it would cover Araragi’s face if positioned normally). If they’d only use more japanesiness… Nii-chan vs Onii-chan lacks its power when subbed as Brother.

Just a personal thing but you can’t base any Nisio adaption of the script itself, the burnable trash has a gag running so far that you CANNOT translate it any other way, *Monogatari cannot be written in proper English, only true engrish will work for it [/opinion]